Q.What do you think about it is not possible to produce vaccine against "common cold" ?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Unlike diseases caused by a single, stable pathogen, the common cold is caused by an enormous and continually mutating diversity of virus strains, making a broadly protective vaccine practically impossible to design.
Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognise and rapidly respond to specific antigens on a particular pathogen, so they are most effective against diseases caused by a single pathogen species with relatively stable antigenic features (e.g., the polio virus, or the smallpox virus). The common cold, however, can be caused by well over 200 different serotypes of viruses, predominantly rhinoviruses, but also including some coronaviruses, adenoviruses and others -- each with distinct surface antigens that the immune system would need to recognise separately. Compounding this problem, these cold-causing viruses (rhinoviruses especially) mutate and evolve their surface proteins comparatively rapidly, continually generating new antigenic variants. As a result, immunity acquired against one strain -- whether through natural infection or through a hypothetical vaccine -- provides little or no cross-protection against the many other different and newly-ari …
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